Rutgers students Shaun Ellis and Thomas Engelhardt tried to discover the secrets sauce behind a “hit” song by analyzing 4,200+ songs that made it to the top ten of Billboard’s Hot-100 chart. Using the echonest api, they took a look at tempo, duration, time signature, key, and abstracts like “energy” and “danceability”. The main results are laid out here.

The fun part is, they made the whole data set available in Tableau for us to play with (download Tableau reader (free) and the dataset). Using the filters, you can answer bizarre questions such as how many hits in 1979 were on the charts more than 20 weeks that were recorded in the key of C (answer: 7). Or you can look at the data over time to discover all kinds of interesting long-term trends:

A scatter of all of the songs illustrates that the average tempo is 120 BPM.

Daniel Rathbone created this tool to aggregate used car prices from Craigslist. Besides being a useful way to shop for cars, it’s also interesting to see how different brands and models hold up in value over time. For example, check out the Accord vs Corvette below.

In a strange juxtaposition of imagery, this photo uses fake blood and kitchen containers to visualize 38 million deaths from various conflicts. Overall, I really like the concept, but from the way the objects are arranged and the angle of the photograph (with the blood taking up only the lower 20% of the photo), they visually seem small to me. Also, I don’t quite get the “World Cuisine” title, despite the food/cooking metaphor.

Visualization of several United Nations indices on education, income, and health. I’m not quite sure what the point of using a “tree” is, but they obviously put some thought into it: The height of the tree trunk is proportional to the total value of the HDI. The size of the three branches are proportional to each sub-indicator. The branches are ordered in increasing order from left to right. The color of the trunk is the average of the color of the components.